Recipes: Chinese

November 06, 2014

Do you revisit recipes to see if you can better them? I do. It’s practically a professional obsession. My friend, veteran cookbook author Molly Stevens and I were just talking today about how our curiosity pushes us to tinker and tweak. Sometimes, however, it’s a vicious cycle and you have to know when to call it quits. Obsessions can turn into distractions.

Yesterday, I took another look at a dim sum recipe that I’d worked through years ago. It’s a daikon radish cake – the pan-fried white slabs that you get at dim sum. When done right, luo bo gao has a lovely crisp outside and tender inside. When done poorly (the cook under-fries), the radish cakes are more soft than crisp.

Luo bo gao is easy to make and on this attempt, I wanted to check three things: (1) Am I okay with the softer texture of using only rice flour; (2) can I use rice flour from the health food store instead of Asian rice flour; and (3) can I freeze the finished cakes to bank my effort?

The original recipe came from Wai Hon Chu’s The Dumpling: A Seasonal Guide (William Morrow, 2009). Wai learned from his father to add wheat starch (a Chinese ingredient used for har gao dumpling dough and some noodles) to firm up the cake. Many recipes use just rice flour. While I like Wai’s texture a lot, I was prompted to try just rice flour to accommodate people with serious gluten issues. Wheat starch may have traces of gluten in it.

April 17, 2014

After reading the dan dan noodle recipe post, Jay emailed earlier this week asking for assistance with a noodle dish that he was trying to replicate from a Bay Area restaurant named Crouching Tiger (where’s the Hidden Dragon?). He shared his sauce recipe with me and asked me to help him tweak it. I looked up the restaurant’s menu and the characters for the noodles that Jay was interested in -- “Sichuan Cold Noodles.” Then I checked out recipes for it online and in my cookbook collection.

Turns out that Jay was looking for an authentic version of Chinese peanut noodles, a dish that I made and ate with abandon in the late 1980s, early 1990s. My husband (then boyfriend) and I ordered the room temperature noodles coated in a spicy, tangy peanut butter-based sauce at Chin Chin in Brentwood, California.

At that time, the restaurant’s “noodles in peanut sauce” defined Chinese cold noodles for many people in Los Angeles. With vegetables and chicken in the mix, the Chin Chin noodles were a great one-dish meal. We were poor students and after a few rounds of takeout, I came up with my own recipe and wrote it down in a recipe keeper.

April 10, 2014

Meatless Mondays is a great idea but I don’t do it. I’m a mostly meatless lunch person. On the days when my husband is at work, I often make myself a vegetarian mid-day snack. A fried egg with leftover rice and some Viet pickles is among my personal favorites. So is banh mi with tofu or egg. This week while rummaging through the hinterlands of my pantry (a deep hallway closet), I found a five-pound box of Quon Yick dried Chinese noodles.

I went to the factory years ago to discuss dumpling wrappers with the owner because the company is one of the oldest of its kind in the Los Angeles area. Quon Yick makes great noodles and dumpling wrappers and used to be Chinatown, Los Angeles. The kind owner, Henry Leong, gifted my friends and me about eight (8) boxes of dried noodles and a bunch of fresh noodles and dumpling skins too. The fresh stuff is gone(!), but the dried noodles remain. I’d forgotten about them and suddenly remembered how great they are. I needed to start using the noodles.

February 27, 2014

Making a really good meatless rendition of Sichuan mapo tofu has eluded me for years. Many of the versions I’ve tried used mushroom to mimic the ground beef or pork. The result was texturally off. I’d tried combining shiitake with white mushroom but it was so strong tasting, woodsy more than anything else. Plus, the mushroom cooked up dark, making the dish totally not like regular mapo tofu. The savory depth and richness of the ground meat that’s used in mapo tofu was missing.

Then there’s the use of weak chile bean sauce. You really need the punchy stuff from Sichuan if you want to makes something that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the conventional version of mapo tofu.

I was looking for a result that looked and tasted quite similar to the real deal. I was looking for a dish that could satisfy by culinarily punking your eyes and palate. That is no easy feat. I know that because I've been trying and thinking for some time.

October 17, 2013

I’ve been grappling with this recipe for some time. It’s
totally easy but the first time I made it a couple years ago, thinking that it
would be great for Asian Tofu, it was bleh. Mediocre tasting and not very special. I
dropped it. Never would I put a recipe into a book that I didn’t like.

But I kept thinking about it, primarily because ginger pairs
well with tofu in classics like Japanese chilled tofu with grated ginger and
soy sauce, or Chinese tofu pudding with ginger syrup. Then I came across a
nearly unused copy of Fragrant
Harbour Taste: The New Chinese Cooking of Hong Kong. Published in 1991,
it was written by Ken Hom who was born in Chicago and is expert in Chinese food
and culture. He recorded some excellent recipes that evoke Hong
Kong’s culinary scene at that time. Leafing through the cookbook, I came across
a recipe for “stir-fried pickled ginger with bean curd.” Ah-ha, paydirt.